“The native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door. The man started up and held him back.
“‘Keep where you are,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It is nothing. Your mistress is frightened, that is all. She must learn to get over this folly.’ Then he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence.
“And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his life came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct moved together towards the place where the silence came from.
“When the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody heap in the middle of the floor.
“He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head torn off.
“That is the incident that changed the character of my man—if it be changed,” concluded Jephson. “He told it me one night as we sat on the deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay. He did not spare himself. He told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind. I asked him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it.
“‘Recall it!’ he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; ‘it is always with me.’”
CHAPTER VIII
One day we spoke of crime and criminals. We had discussed the possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would be uninteresting.
“It is a terribly sad reflection,” remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly; “but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people. Do you know,” he continued, “when I hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous. Once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past. Without the criminal classes we authors would starve.”